Dashboard hacking

[winterkoninkje]

So Apple's latest update has some questionable details apparently. It's claimed the messages sent home don't contain anything meaningful, though I haven't heard of anyone specifically verifying this.

The article provides one way of disabling the service, though I advise against using it. Modern OSes aren't meant to be hacked that way, a better way of disabling it is mentioned in the comments, namely: sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dashboard.advisory.fetch.plist . Not only is this approach cleaner since it uses Apple's own tools, it brings up those tools which — while mostly undocumented — are very helpful for finding out how your system works to spot other potential concerns.

I noticed however that I couldn't find the Dashboard Advisory running on my system. This is probably because I've done another little hack to disable the Dashboard entirely. I can't seem to find the original article on doing this though this one explains in brief how and why you'd want to do it. The command for the curious is: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES && killall Dock .

These are just a couple of the little hacks I've made to my system. I thought any mac users out there might also be interested in them. And yes, both launchctl and defaults have manpages you can look through.